Friedrich Nietzsche

Wilber's View

Nietzsche appears in SES less as an interlocutor in his own right than as the headwaters of two currents Wilber treats with real ambivalence. First, genealogically: Wilber repeatedly names Nietzsche as the starting point of the "postmodern poststructuralist" lineage — from Nietzsche and Bataille through Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard — that supplies both his most useful ally (the "genealogy" method, borrowed via Charles Taylor, for exposing hidden pragmatic contradictions in universalist moral theories) and his sharpest target (deconstructive postmodernism's slide into nihilism). Second, Nietzsche's most famous line — "God is dead" — gets used by Wilber as the crisp summary of the Enlightenment's whole "No more myths!" posture toward the Age of Mythology, the philosophical mood that made room for reason's "dignity" but also set up its later "disaster." And in one of his more sympathetic asides, Wilber places Nietzsche among the philosophers whose intense, even reckless exploration of "limit experiences" and depths — despite themselves being creatures of rationality's own overreach — is what actually kept the door open to mysticism and interiority once positivism had tried to close it. He also traces a separate line of influence, via Schelling and Schopenhauer, running Nietzsche onward to Bergson, Heidegger, and Sartre — placing him at the head of a whole "will" tradition modernity's other critics grew out of.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"No more myths!" was the philosophical battle cry of an entire age, and it soon came to be summarized in Nietzsche's famous dictum, "God is dead."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11, "Brave New World"

…the more one examines the motives—what Nietzsche would call the 'genealogy'—of these theories, the stranger they appear. It seems that they are motivated by the strongest moral ideals, such as freedom, altruism, and universalism… And yet what these ideals drive the theorists toward is a denial of all such goods.

— Charles Taylor, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

From Nietzsche to Bataille to Foucault, from Heidegger to Derrida to Lyotard, the critics have continued their assault, with the postmodern poststructuralists being merely the most recent, although possibly the loudest, of the long line of antimodernists.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11, "Brave New World"

In his idea of Eros as unlimited activity, he set off a whole line of "will" theorists, from Schopenhauer to Bergson to Nietzsche. Paul Tillich traces this line of influence: "The most important pupil of Schopenhauer was Nietzsche. The line then runs from Nietzsche to Bergson, the French voluntarist, Heidegger and Sartre, and to Whitehead, the great metaphysician of our century—all of this came from Schelling."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13, "The Dominance of the Descenders" (on Schelling, quoting Paul Tillich)

See Also

• postmodernism — the lineage Wilber traces back to Nietzsche, and its slide into nihilism
• flatland — the reduced, disenchanted world "God is dead" announces the end of transcendence within
• heidegger — a later link in the "will" and existential lineage Wilber traces from Nietzsche